Tag: Tony Hsieh

What poker can teach you about business

Saturday marked our first, and hopefully last, annual boys weekend that had to be held virtually. A group of people who mostly work in tech played poker over Zoom with real cards instead of a virtual poker table to save the £20 fee (it cost more to buy and post the cards). This was my first ever real game of poker and to say I was not a natural is an understatement.

I am a third of the way through Tony Hsieh’s book and used my first commute in 8 months to listen to more of the audio version, read my Hsieh himself. During today’s section of the book, Tony talks about rediscovering the game of Poker one sleepless night after selling LinkExchange to Microsoft by reading a community website for regular poker players. 

Tony writes that he was ‘fascinated’ by the mathematics of the game. He discovered that luck did not matter so much in the long run as there was a mathematical way to calculate the ‘pot odds’ from the ratio of people still in the bet, the number of chips in the pot and the statistical chance of winning. After noticing the similarities between what he was learning in poker and what he knew about business, Tony made a list of lessons that he could apply in his work. 

The two biggest lessons that poker taught Hsieh were 1, ‘Focus on what’s best for the long term, and 2, the most critical decision is to pick the correct market to be in.

Quote: One of the most interesting things about playing poker was learning the discipline of not confusing the right decision with the individual outcome of any single hand… Tony Hsieh

A small selection of Hsieh’s poker rules for business

  1. Evaluating market opportunities – “Table selection is the most important decision you can make.”
  2. Marketing and branding – “Act weak when strong, act strong when weak. Know when to bluff.
  3. Financials – “Always be prepared for the worst possible scenario.”
  4. Strategy – “Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.”
  5. Continual learning – “Educate yourself. Read books and learn from others who have done it before.”
  6. Culture – “You’ve gotta love the game. To become really good, you need to live it and sleep it.”

I really should have paid attention to rule four, but alas, I started the book too late. I have dusted off my copy of Play poker like the pros that I bought years ago and never used, and I am heading to an online poker table to start my Tony inspired journey.

Send a message to me on Twitter with your best poker tips! 

Happiness Delivered: Tony Hsieh

I am listening to Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness: A path to profits, passion, and purpose today after the sad news of his passing. Hsieh sold his first big company LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million, and then Zappos to Amazon for over $1 billion. There are two things I remember about his work; The first is Zappos’s relentless and genuine focus on excellent customer service, the second is his project to revitalise downtown Las Vagas into a thriving tech centre.

DTP is a $350 million privately funded regeneration project of downtown Las Vagas. Hsieh started the project to support the area around the Zappos HQ and provide an environment for his employees to live and work. The project has since grown to support an extensive network of new businesses and tech start-ups. The DTP website states the project was inspired but Triumph of the city by Edward Glaeser, and that ‘…the best way to accelerate learning and innovation is to maximize serendipitous interactions…’ through the three C’s: Collisions, Co-learning, and Connectedness. 

We believe the best way to accelerate learning and innovation is to maximize serendipitous interactions, density in the office, density in the city, and to prioritize collisions over convenience.

dtplv.com

Like Google and other Silicon Valley companies campuses, you can draw many similarities between the ideas of the DTP community building with the set up of universities. We make a lot of effort to maximise ‘collisional hours’ when students are on or around the campus to increase students interactions with each other. We design modern courses around co-learning, with active learning, group work and small group seminars, student mentorship schemes, a variety of talks and workshops from external speakers, shared study spaces, and opportunities to support student start-ups. We also try to build a strong sense of connectedness, belonging, and emotional connection to the university outside of courses through activities with the Student Union, clubs, and sports.

There are some great communities of learning on cohort-based university course studied online, but with the mass move to blended learning at universities across the world, what more can do more to increase serendipitous interactions? Contact me on Twitter if you have ideas.

You should read Delivering Happiness, or better, listen to the audio version that read by Tony Hsieh himself.